Quick Fix

Had to fiddle with the colours on this thing; it's started fucking with my eyes. I'm just taking some time out of my busy schedule of scamming bank managers out of 0% overdrafts (three new accounts opened, and counting), which I swear to James Mason I'll stop doing when I've funded whatever rent I owe. And a bus slash flight slash RIB to Liverpool. And an Electric Picnic ticknick. And a drink of some kind.
Well at least the Taste of the Summer 2009 (as coined by Stone Cold Steve Shipman- Jacques; the red stuff, I'm not a complete fruit) has started to get sickening. This is the appellation Steve places on a beverage, generally a sugary refreshing fruit-based one, at the start of every summer. Last summer (such as it was) my drink was Tesco own-brand 4% lager, which isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. The summer before it was snakebite, the summer before that it was Kopparberg, before it became as riotously expensive as it now is. Every year we drink these things til our kidneys fall out with us, and you can tell when the summer's on its way out because the drink becomes sickly and does nothing but give you a headache. This has now happened with Jacques. Just as well, because I was just starting to fear for my eye-teeth.
So what now? The landlord is still clamped to my back like someone else's shirt on a muggy day, and the bank managers may start talking to each other at any moment. Only one course of action remains- switch to dark rum for the autumn, polish the brass on my neck, and get up them stairs. Word to your mother...

Derry Is An Odd Place

Another town, another hangover, and another library. I've been out of The Town I Recognise So Easily (there's a tune Phil Coulter never wrote) for so long things keep jarring with me every time I'm back.
For example: I had to carry a guitar and a bass to the Dungloe for a gig we're doing tonight. It's a fundraiser for Rich Coast, a film being shot in Derry as I type - upstairs Dungloe, stacksabands, land if you're about. Now for anyone not acquainted with the Walled City, the distance from the depot to the Dungloe is a couple of hundred yards, five minutes' walk uphill. I was stopped three times, by three separate old men, who used to play in bands, and wanted to talk the ear off me about them. Apparently everybody who was young in Derry in the seventies was in a band, and also probably the Ra. Derry's a very strange place to be at half six on a Thursday in August. There's kids up to the age of eighteen, then nobody else younger than 30, except the occasional flock of foreigners swaddled in clothes that would boil my blood if I wore them in the Alps. Prime tourist season this, so they tell me. Must be a very sad place to visit. "Vere are all ze yunk peepil? Vere is all ze laife?" I know from experience, Herr Schneider- they've fucked off to Belfast and England and Scotland and generally have neither the bus fare nor the inclination to get back. You'll see a strange class of individuals come out after dark, fellas and fillies just about to fuck off to uni in the autumn, or reprobates back for a sesh, or the people who found a paying gig and never left. But we don't talk about them.
Anyway, before I get any more on my own nerves.... I dumped my various crap up the stairs in the Dungloe, which brought up some very unusual memories. I was never out of the joint before I fucked off to the West Glasgow that is Belfast. but that's another set of anecdotes to tell in my anec-dotage. I'm off to work on another hangover, and fund a film while I'm at it. Where else would ye get it? To the Walls, and don't spare the Buck...